Priti Patel cannot pick and choose between asylum seekers
Editorial: ‘Safe and legal’ routes are not always easily accessed by refugees – it doesn’t matter how they get to the UK, a refugee is a refugee
Superficially, the home secretary’s proposal to “expand safe and legal routes” for asylum seekers, with a view to them eventually settling in Britain, is a reasonable, even attractive one. It suggests an end to the appalling people-trafficking across the English Channel that has caused so much misery, and which, as the weather improves, is likely to grow in the coming months.
It is certainly a more constructive approach, and one that suggests that the government at least concedes the principle that the country has a moral and legal obligation to give shelter to those fleeing for their lives. That, scant as it is, counts for progress in a government which, left to its own devices, would probably prefer to abolish the whole concept of asylum. By contrast, asylum seekers who enter Britain through non-approved, unofficial routes will be treated harshly, deemed to have forfeited the right to asylum, and deported to the nearest country willing to take them. Not all asylum seekers are equal or deserve equal treatment in Ms Patel’s view of the world.
The main problem with what might be termed the Patel Doctrine is that it is illegal under international law. There is nothing in any of the international treaties and conventions about “approved” routes out of persecution. The right to asylum is absolute, whether the “host” country likes it or not (as long as that country wants to honour its international treaty promises, something the UK is less reliable about these days). It doesn’t matter whether someone walks into a British embassy or High Commission with an appointment, or tumbles out of the back of a lorry on the A2: a refugee is a refugee.
As the UN High Commission for Refugees points out, under the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, also known as the Geneva agreement, and subsequent protocols: “Anyone seeking asylum should be able to claim in their intended destination or another safe country.” A British home secretary, in other words, cannot pick and choose which asylum seekers she wants to deal with.
Practically, the “safe and legal” routes will not always be easily accessed by refugees. In war zones and emergency camps there may be no available opportunity to meet British or international officials in order to make a claim. In a besieged, bombed out village or city the first priority is escape, and the British embassy may be far away. The occupiers or nominal state authorities in Syria, Yemen or Tigray, for example, are unlikely to be helpful. It is a little fanciful to think refugees will able to make calm applications in peaceful circumstances. Even if they were able to do so, the recent experience in the treatment of Hong Kong citizens suggests that the British authorities will operate formal or informal caps on the numbers permitted to claim. Again, that is contrary to international law.
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The British have long been frustrated by the way asylum seekers, and other migrants for that matter, pass through many safe western liberal democracies on their way to the UK. But it is to some extent exaggerated – Sweden and Germany have taken vastly more Syrian refugees than the UK has, and the British government has even rejected the claims of some unaccompanied children. Besides, some families will have good reasons for coming to the UK, such as family links, the English language and the greater ease in finding work, or at least a perception of that. Some of Britain’s neighbours have an even worse repetition for racism and intolerance then the UK.
There is no legal obligation for migrants to accept or claim asylum in the first safe country they reach. One of the major failings of the EU’s collective response to the migrant crisis of recent years has been that the Mediterranean nations, such as Greece, Italy and Malta, were left to deal with the refugees as best they could, with states such as Hungary refusing to help house migrants; but there were at least some Europe-wide agreements, such as the Dublin Regulation, governing the flows of people. After Brexit, Britain is no longer part of those rules and, apart from paying the French authorities to patrol its beaches, it is on its own. The government’s proposed new law will not resolve the problems Britain has created for itself by leaving the EU. Brexit, demonstrably, has not meant an end to migration, less taking back control of Britain’s borders.
Inevitably, the issues raised by the Patel Doctrine, flawed as it is, will need to be resolved in the courts, at home in the Supreme Court and internationally. They shouldn’t have been raised in the first place, and in reality the only way to simmer down the stubbornly inflammatory question of immigration is to try and construct once again some kind of national consensus on the issue.
The new points-based immigration system and the new asylum policy do not in reality add up to a policy that serves the UK economy or the migrants themselves well.
Britain needs and benefits from migration just as much as the migrants benefit from a fresh start, free from war, poverty and persecution. There is tremendous opportunity in what is now termed a migration crisis, just as there have been past episodes of refugees seeking to make new lives for themselves in Britain, working hard and doing the best for themselves, their families and their adopted country; some of their descendants have risen to prominent positions in public life.
If only leaders such as Ms Patel would acknowledge that there is no reason the immigrants of today cannot repeat the success of the immigrants of yesterday, the debate on migration would take on a much healthier, more rational tone.
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